Sovereignty in Ruins argues that political sovereignty has never existed apart from the aesthetic, media, and linguistic forms through which it is staged, fractured, and sustained. The book traces an alternative genealogy of political theory from its classical and early modern origins through ancien régime France—the first modern absolutist state—to show how sovereignty is made legible through aesthetic formulations of the body politic and the management of its own exposure in philosophy, literature, art, and architecture—from royal memoirs to tragedy to political philosophy, painting and, eventually, photography, to show how every effort to either secure or move beyond sovereignty must contend with its remains, its fragments, its ruins, as the conditions of thinking politically.